A reassessment of The Act of Killing – or to write about what we don’t know

Jagal - The Act of Killing

Jagal, The Act of Killing in Bahasa Indonesia

On 30 September, Joshua Oppenheimer released his documentary The Act of Killing for free unlimited download in Indonesia, the country where 48 years ago the mass killing of communists and their sympathisers that his film deals with took place. It is  a bold stroke – the film, titled Jagal in Indonesian, had not been released in theatres in the country but it had been widely available at smaller venues and for group screenings. By all accounts the vivid and lurid description of how probably some 500,000 people or more were killed by the army, nationalist and Islamic militias and thugs has already had a momentous impact in Indonesia, where for decades state ideology erased these events from official history and demonised anything even remotely left-wing. The country still bans all things communist. Under the military-dominated regime headed by general Suharto that lasted until 1998, each year television showed the same propaganda movie on the alleged communist coup attempt and the kidnapping, torture and murder of six generals on 1 October 1965 that sparked the mass killings. Students across the country also had to attend screenings of the movie. “I remember watching the propaganda movie every year. It was scary,” one former student told me recently. Even after Suharto and his coterie lost power in 1998, there was no active, or effective, re-examination of the past.

 “I remember watching the propaganda movie every year. It was scary”

That is where The Act of Killing comes in. The film’s Holywoodised style, twisted narrative and obsession with sickening detail are what makes it compelling to a larger Indonesian audience, I was told on a recent trip to the country. Exactly the qualities that made me wary about what is after all a serious documentary about a horrendous, nearly forgotten crime are what make it succeed where more sober treatments have failed. When I earlier posted about The Act of Killing , I saw only one side of the story, what was in front of me, and other than many people who also saw the movie I was disturbed by the balance of its choices. I made the mistake of assuming that the main target for the movie was a Western audience while the real impact will be felt in Indonesia itself, of course. Also, I had no idea to what degree the old New Order, initiated by Suharto during his purge of the communists, still exerts a hold over the country, despite democratisation since the 1998 Reformasi.

A colleague of mine has made a career out of stressing the fallibility of journalists and of suggesting that we should be open about our lack of knowledge.

Indonesia, the largest Muslim country by population in the world, is a fascinating place with huge potential but seems to be held back by corruption and political paralysis that have their roots in the past. I cannot claim to know it after spending several weeks there and talking to many well-informed people but I understand a tiny bit more than before I went. Which brings me to the point I raise in the sub-heading: What can we write about that which we don’t know very much about? I’m not phrasing this as an absolute: Should we write at all about what we don’t know intimately? Because a negative answer would mean the total dismissal of the majority of what appears on social media and would even invalidate much of ‘traditional’ journalism. Clearly writers are not all-knowing, even if they are experts in their fields. We all have to fill in the blanks to a certain degree and how intelligently we do that may often be more important than the extent of our knowledge, assuming that we possess some basic information on our subjects. A colleague of mine has made a career out of stressing the fallibility of journalists and of suggesting that we should be open about our lack of knowledge. I find it patronising and impractical to pack stories with lists of caveats and mostly just assume that I’m writing for a relatively sophisticated audience that realises that I give a picture to the best of my abilities. But there are occasions where you fuck up or where you change your mind after finding out more. I guess my formula to deal with that is: Try very hard to avoid it but don’t be paralysed by it.

An evening on Tim Hetherington – and all I took were some lousy phone pics

More musings on conflict reporting – my conflicted view

Stephen Mayes, director of the estate of Tim Hetherington, talks at de Balie in Amsterdam
Stephen Mayes, director of the estate of Tim Hetherington, talks at de Balie in Amsterdam

Tim Hetherington was a wonderful photographer and documentary maker who operated mostly in conflict zones, which on 20 April 2011 got him killed in Misrata, Libya. The Arab Spring, so hopefully named, has been particularly deadly and otherwise damaging for those covering it. An exhibition of Tim’s work arrived in Amsterdam in July and a new film on his life, a tribute directed by Sebastian Junger with whom he made the 2010 award-winning documentary Restrepo on life at an American outpost in Afghanistan, also had its Dutch premiere…


Various friends of Tim’s attended the launch and gave presentations that I won’t go into; I want to talk about me and Tim. I never met Tim, never heard of him before Restrepo and only vaguely afterwards. But we had a few things in common, apart from rugged good looks (I wish). We both did journalism courses in the UK and we both ended up in war zones. I know it’s not much but it’s more than some. Yet when I listened to the presentations and as I watched the film, the gulf between our experiences seemed vast, making me question the way I engaged with some of the same topics that Tim came across. There was a charming bit in which he has to talk about what it is that he’s doing. He starts out with a rather worthy description, only to stop himself short and say “that’s bullshit”. More attempts follow before he gets it right, kind of. It feels like it’s meant to show the difficulty war reporters have in talking about their work without sounding pompous, full of pathos and bravado or, on the other hand, overly jaded. But it can also be seen as defanging any such qualms pre-emptively as in, ‘see, he knew how difficult it was to talk about it’. Yet he talked about it a lot, on camera and on the record…


It always makes me feel uncomfortable. I have not heard people talk about war reporting in public in a way that sits well with me, probably reflecting a puritan streak that urges me: do, don’t tell. I find it almost impossible to talk about my decade or so covering conflict in a way that does not somehow trivialise it, dramatise it or worse, instrumentalise it for my own greater glory. When I sometimes try to discuss it, as dispassionately and in as sparse and stripped-down terms as I find possible, it feels as if nobody listens. Poor me. It is as Tim also said: you need to communicate in order for people to be able to engage with the subject. But I feel utterly conflicted about people who continue to communicate such issues outside the context of immediate war reporting. In the film on his life, many also said of Tim that he was always engaged with his subjects, the people he came across, whom he kept treating as individuals, as human.

Stephen Mayes, James Brabazon and Max Houghton talking about Tim Hetherington at de Balie, Amsterdam
James Brabazon, James Brabazon and Max Houghton talking about Tim Hetherington at de Balie, Amsterdam

Expressing such engagement also makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Maybe there’s a big difference between writers and photographers, also in the levels of danger encountered and in the way they process what they see, but I find the exhortation to keep in mind that the people you write about or photograph are also human, individuals with their own stories and not just characters in a larger plot, utterly redundant and preposterous. The cliché that war reporters only write about cannon fodder or people as numbers, is misleading and tiresome. Overwhelmingly, reporters who risk their lives, who insert themselves knowingly into dangerous situations, are very much aware of the excess of humanity around them. Human yes, always interesting? No. War and conflict tend to polarise people, resulting in a couple of standard narratives that many of those involved and engaged in conflict employ. It is a reporter’s job, maybe not a photographer’s, to puncture those shells and dig down to the real story if there is such a thing. Combat may temporarily heighten one’s senses but continual conflict flattens everything, including what distinguishes people. After a while, all stories become similar, whether it’s an American soldier’s or an Iraqi Jihadist’s. The logic of violence is often frighteningly similar and therefore also horribly clichéd. Yes, it is ritualistic and it has to do with male bonding but to me these themes never held the fascination they seemed to have had for Tim Hetherington. Perhaps that is at the root of much of my unease; I have always been a reluctant war reporter with a visceral distrust of people who sought out such situations willingly. Just maybe the life and work of Tim Hetherington will start me thinking differently about such things. But I’m a hard nut to crack.

I yet have to see Tim Hetherington’s show ‘Infidel’ at Foam Amsterdam and may post on this again afterwards…

Art, conflict and pretty pics – Nat Muller on Richard Mosse’s The Enclave

Poster for The Enclave, Irish Pavillion, 55th Venice Biennale
The poster for The Enclave at the 55th Venice Biennale. On the back Lac Vert Lullaby. A text at the bottom said that it was recorded by Ben Frost at Lac Vert, Congo, in 2012 for The Enclave.

“Artists do not per se have an accountability towards their audiences. If anything their accountability is to make interesting work”

Nat Muller, independent curator and critic with her share of experience  in conflict areas and former conflict areas such as the Middle East and the Balkans, shines her light on Richard Mosse’s The Enclave, shown in the Irish pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She reacts to my doubts about a work that straddles the divide between art and photojournalism, and more directly to the criticism by Louise Williams, the Irish journalist with extensive experience in Congo. You can follow Nat and Louise on twitter: @nat_muller and @Loureports and Louise has a blog: travels with my microphone